Georg Friedrich Haas

Georg Friedrich Haas

Georg Friedrich Haas biography

Georg Friedrich Haas was born in 1953 in Graz, a city in the east of Austria. His childhood was spent in the mountainous province of Vorarlberg, on the Swiss border. The landscape and the atmosphere of the place have left a lasting impression on his personality.

The atmosphere was marked not so much by natural beauty in the accepted sense of the word. Rather, Haas experienced the mountains as a menace; he felt closed in by the narrow valley where the sun rarely penetrated. Nature for him represented a dark force.

The composer adds: “Just as important for me was the experience of being an outsider: unlike my younger siblings, I never learned to speak the local Alemannic dialect. Also, I was a Protestant in a predominantly Catholic society.”

To study music, Haas returned to his native city where his professors were Gösta Neuwirth and Ivan Eröd. Later, he continued his studies in Vienna with Friedrich Cerha.

Haas: “For all our apparent differences (and probably mutual personal disappointments) I learned from Eröd – apart from many things about the craft of composition – one principle above all else: that the measure of everything is Man, that is, the possibilities inherent in human perception”.

Haas holds Friedrich Cerha in high esteem, something that the older composer (born in 1926) returns in full measure. When the occasion arises, they demonstrate their mutual appreciationunstintingly. In 2007, it was Cerha, the doyen of Austrian composers, who proposed his former pupil for the Great Austrian State Prize which Haas duly received that year.

Until then, however, Haas had had a thorny path to traverse. He speaks openly of the years of “total failure” in trying to make his mark as a composer – another experience to leave its imprint on his development, aggravating his pessimistic leanings. Success, when it did gradually emerge, only mitigated his pessimism but could never wholly eliminate it.

It is no wonder, then, that night, darkness, the loss of illusions should have played such an important role in Haas’ oeuvre (such as in his Hölderlin-opera Nacht,1995/1998). It was not until quite recently that his music has been illuminated by light.

Light effects, as integral components of a range of his compositions, have featured prominently for quite some time now, designed by artists specially for the music. (in vain, 2000, and particularly Hyperion, a Concerto for Light and Orchestra, 2000). However, light as opposed to darkness first emerged as late as 2006 in Sayaka for percussion and accordion as well as in the piano trio Ins Licht (2007) written for Bálint András Varga.

Georg Friedrich Haas is known and respected internationally as a highly sensitive and imaginative researcher into the inner world of sound. Most of his works (with the notable exception of the Violin Concerto, 1998) make use of microtonality which the composer has subjected to thorough examination in the wake of Ivan Wyschnegradsky and Alois Hába. He has taught courses and lectured on the subject in several countries; in 1999 he was invited by the Salzburg Festival to give a talk under the title “Beyond The Twelve Semitones”, with the subtitle “Attempt at a Synopsis of Microtonal Composition Techniques”. In the last paragraph, he writes:

“Micro counts as ‘tonality’ only in contrast with ‘normal tonality’ in its role as a system of reference. Where this system of reference has become obsolete, the notion of ‘microtonality’ has been replaced by the free decision of the individual composer in his use of pitch as his material.”

Haas: “I am not really comfortable with being pigeonholed as a ‘microtonal composer’. Primarily, I am a composer, free to use the means needed for my music. There is no ideology regarding ‘pure’ intonation, either as Pythagorean number mysticism or as a notion of ‘Nature’ determined by trivial physics. I am a composer, not a microtonalist.”

In each new work, Haas enters uncharted territory, but his music is firmly rooted in tradition. His profound admiration for Schubert has found moving expression in his Torso of 1999/2001, an orchestration of the incomplete piano sonata in C major, D 840, an image of the tragic figure of Franz Schubert. Haas paid respect to Mozart not only in his "… sodaß ich’s hernach mit einem Blick gleichsam wie ein schönes Bild…im Geist übersehe," composed for string orchestra in 1990/1991, but also in 7 Klangräume, 2005, meant to be interspersed with movements of Mozart’s Requiem fragment (that is, divested of the supplements provided by his pupils). In Blumenstück,2000, for chorus, bass tuba and string quintet, one hears echoes of Beethoven (perhaps never intended by the composer). In the Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra, 2003/2004, the solo instrument quotes a motif from Franz Schreker’s opera Der ferne Klang (‘O Vater, dein trauriges Erbe’). Commissioned by the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Haas’ Traum in des Sommers Nacht (2009) is a tribute to Mendelssohn, drawing on motifs from works of that composer, masterfully woven into Haas’ own music.

The Cello Concerto, just as Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich ...,1999, for percussion and ensemble, reflects Haas’s political commitment and his bitter realisation of his helplessness as a composer: there is no way his music could serve to better the world. The percussion concerto was written at the time of the Balkan war; when Haas heard aeroplanes flying overhead carrying their deadly burden, he asked himself whether anyone could hear him, if he were to cry out in protest against the war. The Cello Concerto begins with a scream in unbearable pain, followed by a section where the drumbeat conjures up the march rhythm of the Prussian army: a plea against fascism.

A daringly innovative composer of rich imaginative power, a homo politicus aware of his responsibilities as a citizen, Georg Friedrich Haas is one of the leading artists in Europe today. Among the prizes he has won are the SWR Symphony Orchestra Composition Prize 2010, the Music Award of the City of Vienna 2012 and the Music Award Salzburg 2013.

About the music

Harmony of Futility

The latest music of Georg Friedrich Haas

If there is anything that can be viewed as the essence of his music, then it is experimentation with sound: Georg Friedrich Haas, who was born in 1953 in Graz and has quietly risen to become one of the most important Austrian composers internationally, always felt severely limited by the sonic and harmonic possibilities of the established system of equal temperament. Notes shaded by startling microtonal deviations, such as in his ensemble piece Nacht-Schatten (1991) or in his Hölderlin-based chamber opera Nacht(1995-96), have therefore been determining factors in his compositions since the beginning of his career. Intensive experimentation with floating constellations of overtones has lent a new quality of radicalism to Haas’ sound since his First String Quartet (1997): by way of intricate, filigree sonic structures, his music sheds light into the darker reaches of a society which shows an increasing tendency to shut out that which is foreign or strange.

Works like the First String Quartet make particularly high demands on their performers’ sense of ensemble. Rooted in an utterly eccentric tuning of the four stringed instruments which is derived from four independent four-note chords, the piece drifts off in natural harmonics, bowed only on the open strings, despite which a number of different frequencies can be produced by virtue of the microtonal tuning system. A work of gliding transitions and of slowly developing and abruptly ending processes, the First String Quartet functions thanks only to a high level of precision in tuning and coordination on the part of the performers.

This dialectic between individual parts and the resulting overall sound had already been illuminated by Haas in two earlier works: in the 1994 piece with the unpronounceable title ”.…“, the individual parts of the accordion and the viola only gradually merge with the ensemble sound, which they then influence and from which they, in turn, draw their own inspiration. The process was then made even more radical in …Einklang freier Wesen (1994/96), which refers directly to the Hölderlinian Utopia of the title, artfully weaving together stand-alone parts for between two and ten soloists.

Haas continued his overtone experiments in the sextetNach-Ruf…ent-gleitend(1999); its intervals, which are based on the semitone row, are not produced by way of scordatura tuning, but are entrusted completely to the control of the six performers – in contrast to the First String Quartet. These tantalizing oscillations are again and again infiltrated by strangely familiar-sounding melodic impostors. These vague reminiscence, however, are set in half and quarter-tone scales, in order that their inherently romantic impressions drift off into the realm of alienation. A memorial to music history and, at the same time, a premonition of a fascination with decidedly futuristic sounds.

Haas’ most radical statement in overtone sonority is embodied by the structurally daring ensemble piece in vain(2000): in this 75-minute work, harmonic forms derived from the overtone rows collide with tritones or fourths and fifths, much like in his Violin Concerto(1998). This action produces coarse microtonal surfaces that Haas repeatedly allows to give way to circling, spiraling forms: looped sonic wisps that seem to be cautiously searching, groping and feeling, but never leading anywhere in particular, like the endless staircases in the drawings of Maurits Cornelius Escher. A touch of futility hangs over this music, quietly bemoaning the impossibility of ever achieving perfect harmony, let alone the harmonic co-existence of human beings. Without a doubt, through its integration of the overtone spectrum, Haas’ music, which has always involved sound experimentation, has now taken on totally new, even more independent qualities.